when scrolling through highscore screenshots or youtube minimetro recordings,
I often recognize highscores are in some cities obtained by extensively long
and overlapping/parallel circular lines. I’d like to propose something to make
these dramatically overlong lines approach less attractive.

It really really puzzles me that this strategy seems to be a quite good or even
highscore-prone approach because it absolutely doesn’t correspond to
metro network building reality. The authorities out there in the metropolitan
areas of this planet have to look at public budget how many kilometres of
tunnels to dig or viaducts to build.

So why not limit the metro network’s length in the play?

There could be a formula saying the network length could be max x times the total
of all interstation distances.

I don’t say that this limitation should be very tight. It should only
make the extensively-long-and-parallel-line approach less attractive or
unfeasible.

The limitation of max network length could, but doesn’t need
to be transparent to the user, until he/she really builds lines like a hero.
So also please take care I am not necessarily proposing an additional budget
function “give me more network length” instead of locomotive, wagon, tunnel etc.

Other users’ and developers’ feedback very much welcome and appreciated!

Because the distances between two randomly generated stations are not always equal, even if you round the accurate decimal numbers up or down to whole numbers.

That can drastically affect the total metro network line length by ten-fold if you continue to generate stations at random places on the map. Let alone, at places where sometimes can be restrictive in how you lay out the metro network lines.

It’s not a good idea to set a length cap on the gameplay where it doesn’t restrict players to build whatever types of efficient or inefficient metro lines. What if you need to consider players who just wanted to build the longest lines possible while trying to score the highest scores? We actually did have these types of players, as they are working to solve an ARG that exists in the game. In cases such as this, it will be very unwelcoming.

That would be in the realms of “By Design”. I don’t have a lot of knowledge of what decisions were made behind the scenes, but I believed they need to come up with a hard restriction on how far the game can go.

If you can wait for a bit, one of the developers may be able to answer your concern.

We’ve purposely kept the hard limits on what you can do in the game to a minimum to allow people to explore the game space and find these weird edge cases. Editing and manipulating lines is the core appeal of Mini Metro (at least initially) and we’ve tried to remove as many impediments to that process as possible - hence the recent change to allowing line crossings.

Our ideas around balancing line length was just down to regularity of service - the longer the line, the more infrequent and unreliable the service. Plus as jasperwillem points out, if we did cap line length then we’d have to add more lines (which we’d love to do), but the UI in its current for just wouldn’t support that.

But yeah I get that it’s not very sensible, as in the real world excavating underground tunnels is incredibly expensive and requires decades of planning!

An easy starter to implement the “more realistic metro layout” thought would be a map achievement like “Transport 1200 passengers in [city name] with straight lines only” / or “…maximum a single circle line”.